Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife

Stewart O’Nan, author of The Speed Queen and A Prayer for the Dying, discusses his newest novel, The Good Wife. On a clear winter night in upstate New York, two young men break into a house believing it is empty. It isn’t, and within minutes an old woman is dead and the house is in flames. Soon after, the men are caught by the police. Across the county, a phone rings in a darkened bedroom, waking a pregnant woman. It is her husband. He wants her to know that he and his friend have gotten themselves into a little trouble. So Patty Dickerson’s old life ends and a strange new one begins. At once a love story and a portrait of a woman discovering her own strength, The Good Wife follows Patty through the twenty-eight years of her husband’s incarceration as she raises her son, navigates a system that has no place for her, and braves the scorn of her community. Compassionate and unflinching, The Good Wife illuminates a marriage and a family tested to the limits of endurance.